Saturday, October 8, 2016

The gang-up on Don Brash

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, October 5.)

It’s hard to recall a more
concerted gang-up against a public figure than the one that followed last
week’s launch of former National Party leader Don Brash’s Hobson’s Pledge
movement, which wants an end to race-based preference.

The mild-mannered Brash is no
stranger to public kickings, but even he must have been taken aback by the
sheer venom of the backlash.

Maori broadcaster Willie
Jackson said he was crazy. Labour leader Andrew Little called him racist (now
that’s original). Prime minister John Key, Brash’s successor as National
leader, belittled him by saying he sounded like a broken record.

Almost without exception, the
media reaction was contemptuous. One political editor dismissed Brash as a
jack-in-the-box – “wind him up and out he pops, shouting ‘boo’ over race
relations”.

Columnist Toby Manhire
suggested Brash and his supporters should start a colony on Mars. Hone Harawira
labelled him a redneck – the default option for Maori activists stumped for a
proper argument.

Media interviewers, including
Radio New Zealand’s Mihingarangi Forbes andTV3’s Lisa Owen, were openly
hostile. There was no pretence of the journalistic neutrality once required of
broadcasters. No surprises there.

Some of the media coverage verged
on dishonest. A headline on Radio New Zealand’s website, for instance,
proclaimed that the Act Party rejected Hobson’s Pledge. This would have been
damning, given that Brash is a former leader of Act and it’s a party that has consistently
opposed entrenched privilege.

Only thing is, the headline
wasn’t accurate. Act leader David Seymour faulted the way Brash’s group had
gone about things, but he reaffirmed his party’s opposition to race-based
parliamentary seats and other appointments – the issue at the heart of the Hobson’s
Pledge campaign

In any case, it was in
Seymour’s interests to distance himself from Brash. Act may once have been a
party that challenged the status quo, but Seymour’s precarious place in the
political power structure depends on him not getting too uppity.

Two common threads ran
through the overwhelmingly disparaging response to Hobson’s Pledge. The first
was that Brash’s critics seemed determined to muddy the water with extraneous
issues – anything to deflect attention from his core message. None of his
critics made a serious attempt to engage with the substance of his arguments.

Little, for instance, raised
the shameful matter of 19th century land confiscations and unlawful
detentions, but that’s no argument for separate Maori seats in Parliament or on
councils. There are other ways of
atoning for historic injustices than by subverting fundamental democratic
values that guarantee equal rights for all.

Besides, as Brash pointed out
on radio, people of Maori descent have demonstrated time and time again that they’re perfectly capable
of getting themselves elected to Parliament and councils on their own merits. It’s
patronising to assume that the only way they can succeed is through designated
Maori seats or the creation of non-elected positions that take power out of the
hands of voters.

The other common line running
through the anti-Brash invective was that he should shut up and pull his head
in because no one’s listening anymore – at least according to the critics.

But New Zealanders were
listening in 2004 when Brash’s “one law for all” speech to the Orewa Rotary
Club triggered such a dramatic resurgence in National’s popularity that Helen
Clark’s Labour government came within a whisker of being toppled at the next election.

I heard one academic on TV3’s
The Nation last Sunday contemptuously suggest
that the people who supported Brash then are a dying minority. I suppose that’s
one way to marginalise people whose views you don’t like. But have public
attitudes changed so markedly since 2004?

I don’t believe so. In recent
years, voters in several places – Nelson and New Plymouth among them – have
overwhelmingly rejected proposals that would have created special Maori wards.

In any case, Brash isn’t
expounding some fringe extreme-Right idea, as his detractors would have us
believe. All he’s doing is affirming the importance of equality before the law. This isn’t something that
changes according to whatever happens to be ideologically in fashion. It’s a fundamental
principle of liberal democracy.

But make no mistake: Brash’s
attackers want you to believe that we’ve “moved on” since 2004 and that Brash is
just an irritating anachronism.

They all have their own
reasons for wanting to shut him down.

For Key, the India rubber man
of politics, it’s all about political practicalities. The Maori Party, whose existence depends on Maori seats, are National's allies.It’s only a few years
since National officially favoured the abolition of Maori seats in Parliament,
but ssshhh – we’re not supposed to remember that.

For Brash’s Maori critics,
the sentiment expressed by Captain William Hobson on the original Waitangi Day
– “now we are one people” – must be resisted because if it caught on, it could
undermine Maoridom’s increasingly pervasive exercise of political power through
the back door.

As for left-wing Pakeha, their
bitter dislike of Brash can be attributed to blind adherence to the prevailing
ideology of the day, which elevates fashionable identity politics over
long-standing democratic fundamentals that guarantee equal rights for all.

Footnote: A few days ago I cast my votes for the Masterton District Council. I made my choices partly on the basis of which candidates opposed giving unelected Maori representatives decision-making powers on council committees.

Sixteen percent of the Masterton population identify as Maori and there are people of Maori descent here who would have got my vote had they put themselves forward for election, but none did. If Maori wish to participate in governance then they should do it the way everyone else does - by contesting elections.

2 comments:

The ad hominem attacks on Brash were to be expected, of course, particularly on the part of those who, like Jackson and Harawira, cannot muster a reasoned argument at the best of times. Likewise, the shrill cries of "racism!" from the Left are the reflex response to any attack on their support for Maori separatism. None of this vitriol means much: those in the media and the beltway love the sound of their own voices so much that they convince themselves there's no other valid point of view, other than that which their groupthink dictates. As it happens, the silent majority will, by definition, take this all in, rather than rave about it, and ponder on it until next year's general election: then there will be a shock for some like John Key, who have succumbed to complacency. Remember, it wasn't just the public response to the Orewa speech that reflected this powerful undercurrent of discontent; five years later, the Constitution Advisory Panel got a large flea in its collective ear when it was mooted that we might have a written constitution with the Treaty at its heart. The recent rejection, by those voters who were properly consulted, of Maori appointments to local councils, leaves one in no doubt that this issue of Maori separatism and political privilege remains very much a live one. No, the record isn't cracked, and we're going to hear the song played quite a few times yet, over the forthcoming twelve months.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.